Tag Archives: OSPO

COVID-19: How Google is helping the open source community

COVID-19 has affected so much of the world around us, and open source is no exception. Project resilience is being challenged by COVID-19. Community members have even less time to contribute. Event cancellations are impacting networking, collaboration, and fundraising.


Google wants to do everything it can to help. This means that it’s even more important for the Google Open Source Programs Office to step up our commitment to citizenship. We’re taking several steps to support industry organizations and the projects that we participate in to help them operate during this time.

Virtual Events Support

  • Participating in talks internally and externally to Google to share knowledge and insight into open source projects and practices with the wider open source communities.
  • To support the shift from an offline to online events model, we created an online guide to share resources and event planning knowledge: Open Source Virtual Events Guide.

Talent

  • COVIDActNow is a multidisciplinary team working to provide disease intelligence and data analysis on COVID in the U.S. Google contributed to this project by improving their data pipeline allowing for county level data visualization, providing more localized insight for crisis planning.
  • Nextstrain is a platform for real-time tracking of pathogen evolution. Google contributed engineering, design, and translation resources to help scientists conduct research into real-time tracking of pathogen evolution.
  • Schema.org - Google led Schema.org rapid response designs for structured data markup to contribute to the COVID-19 global response, leading to the UK making similar announcements.
  • Google’s annual internship program was converted to a digital program where interns will focus on open source projects, allowing projects to gain new contributors in a non-traditional environment.
  • Google Summer of Code brings over 1100 university students from around the world together with open source communities, many of which are working on various humanitarian efforts related to COVID-19. The program is completely online so students can work with their mentors remotely, allowing all organizations to continue receiving the support they need.
The impact from COVID-19 will have long-term effects on many organizations and projects that may not be immediately apparent. In the coming months, we will monitor the needs of projects and organizations across open source. We understand the value of open source not just to the tech world, but the impact it has on bringing communities together; Google has a long standing history in open source and we will continue supporting our community to stay strong during and after the passing of COVID-19.

We encourage folks who have the time and ability to support open source communities to do so by getting involved and reaching out directly to organizations that interest you. This is a time for all of us to come together and lift up each other and open source.

By Megan Byrd-Sanicki and Radha Jhatakia, Google Open Source

Google Code-in 2019 is Right Around the Corner!

This year is the 10th anniversary of the Google Code-in (GCI) contest! Students ages 13–17, globally, can learn about open source development by working on real projects, with mentorship from active developers. GCI begins on December 2, 2019 and runs for seven weeks, ending January 23, 2020.

Google Code-in is unique because students have the autonomy to select what they’re interested in working on from 2,500+ tasks created by open source organizations, all while having mentors available to answer questions as they work on tasks.

There are many questions that developers of any age ask themselves when they initially get involved in open source; from where to start to whether they have the expertise to truly support the organization. The beauty of GCI lies in the participating open source organizations who realize teens are often first time contributors, leading mentors who volunteer to come prepared with the patience and experience to help these newcomers join the open source community.
New contributors bring fresh perspectives, ideas, and enthusiasm into their open source communities, helping them thrive. Throughout the last 9 years, 58 GCI organizations helped 11,000 students from 108 countries make real contributions to open source projects; and to this day may of those students continue to participate in various open source communities and many have become mentors themselves! Some have even gone on to join Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

Contest participants work on a varied level of tasks that require anywhere from beginner to advanced skills in the following five categories:
  • Code: writing or refactoring
  • Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
  • Outreach/Research: community management, marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
  • Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
  • Design: graphic design or user interface design
Organizations that are interested in mentoring students, can apply for Google Code-in beginning Thursday, October 10th. Google Code-in starts for students Monday, December 2nd!
Visit the contest site g.co/gci to learn more about the contest and find flyers, slide decks, timelines, and more.

By Radha Jhatakia, Google Open Source